Black Africa Quotes

#1. Something struck me in Africa, in black Africa, where polygamy is legal: the solitary woman is the rule there, from at an extremely young age, and the children are always the mother's responsibility.

Dacia Maraini

#2. Because of its exceptional capacity for self-criticism, the West took the initiative in abolishing slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in black Africa, where rival African tribes took black prisoners to be sold as slaves in the West.

Ibn Warraq

#3. I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it.

John Keegan

#4. Ancient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt.

Cheikh Anta Diop

#5. In black Africa, one does not strike, one does not express, one walks right.

Yannick Noah

#6. A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million;

Elizabeth Kolbert

#7. At home in South Africa I have sometimes said in big meetings where you have black and white together: 'Raise your hands!' Then I have said: 'Move your hands,' and I've said 'Look at your hands - different colors representing different people. You are the Rainbow People of God.

Desmond Tutu

#8. The idea of black poverty is always presented as the outcome of white wealth, but what South Africa has is a poverty problem, not necessarily a black poverty problem because it is a largely black country.

Ferial Haffajee

#9. They say African Americans. I say black people. I've only been to Africa once. I've been in America all my life!

Herman Cain

#10. An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

James A. Baldwin

#11. I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'

Henry Louis Gates

#12. It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

Grover Norquist

#13. Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a black man in America.

Herman Cain

#14. What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

Jean-Paul Sartre

#15. I was blessed to get an education available to few black women in Africa at that time. Every woman should be able to get an education so she can serve others.

Julia Mavimbela

#16. A very long time ago, some 2.5 million years B.C., the mother of human species as we know it, our ultimate ancestor, appeared in East Africa ... She was four feet tall and probably black..

Norman F. Cantor

#17. Black is not a notion. Africa is not a color. Africa is a culture. So you can be pitch black and I am my color but I'm more African than you can ever be because culturally there are certain things that you just don't understand.

Jihan El-Tahri

#18. I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there.

Marcus Garvey

#19. I wanted to make a black story about South Africa. Unfortunately, no producer in the United States would put one penny into a black story.

Euzhan Palcy

#20. If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England.

Idris Elba

#21. In South Africa today, black is the new black, bra.

Zukiswa Wanner

#22. We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.

Craig Venter

#23. Shadows in shadows He watches through dreams Wings black as Africa Body strong as stone Done waiting The ravens call.

P.C. Cast

#24. I was 15 years old when I first heard the name Mandela, or Madiba, as he is fondly known in Africa. In apartheid South Africa he was public enemy number one. Shrouded in secrecy, myth and rumour, the media called him 'The Black Pimpernel'.

Kumi Naidoo

#25. I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.'

Maya Angelou

#26. Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African.

Whoopi Goldberg

#27. Coming from Morocco was just different, man. It's a third-world country, and you are trying to make it happen. That's all it is. I didn't have any problem hooking up with the black kids because I'm from North Africa. And as far as Latinos, we are all the same.

French Montana

#28. The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.

Malcolm X

#29. We're going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people
especially black women. We've been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here.

Alice Walker

#30. Ultimately the white man should leave the United States and the black people should go back to Africa.

Bobby Fischer

#31. You know how we'd get along better? If everybody'd just remember how we're all related. White, black, Asian, skin. No difference. All the bloodlines go back to that one old mama in Africa.

Charles De Lint

#32. What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang?

Countee Cullen

#33. I was adopted my black Americans, I feel that I'm a 'Hybrid'. When I'm around Africans'I suddenly feel very black American. And when I'm around black Americans'I feel very North African. North Africa and black America are both the creators of Kola Boof.

Kola Boof

#34. They put exclusively black history in the syllabus. Is there a difference between a black history of the world and a proper history? They say children must read black novels. Does a novel have a skin colour?

Imraan Coovadia

#35. ...He sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert's sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time.

Mike Bond

#36. Look to Africa, when a black king shall be crowned for the day of deliverance is at hand!

Marcus Garvey

#37. Religion and nationalism? I defecate on the altar of religious conviction, and wipe my arse on the flag of national pride.

Ian Martin

#38. Further north, I met a Siberian hermit who lived in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. His life's passion was wrestling black bears ... in the nude (him not the bears). He did not know why he did it. All the hermit knew was that if he stopped wrestling bears, he would die.

Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

#39. America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Pat Buchanan

#40. The titanic effort that has brought liberation to South Africa, and ensured the total liberation of Africa, constitutes an act of redemption for the black people of the world.

Nelson Mandela

#41. There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#42. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

Michelle Alexander

#43. The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike.

Henry Louis Gates

#44. The black people's struggle has vanquished racism. It was God who created colour. Today Obama, a son of Kenya, a son of Africa, has made it in the United States of America.

Muammar Al-Gaddafi

#45. He just never understood how white people could be racist in South Africa. "Africa is full of black people," he would say. "So why would you come all the way to Africa if you hate black people? If you hate black people so much, why did you move into their house?" To him it was insane. Because

Trevor Noah

#46. Living in four parks in the state of Assam. A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million; it has since been reduced to around five thousand animals.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#47. People always say 'You do racial comedy.' And I don't, exactly. I do cultural comedy. Because race and culture are two different things. There's black people from America and then there's black people from Africa. Racially, they're the same; culturally, they're extremely different.

Russell Peters

#48. We have a tendency in this country that when we say Black it automatically means Black Americans. But that's a big mistake, and that keeps us divided. There are Blacks all over this entire world-even in Africa.

Irene Cara

#49. South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.

Thabo Mbeki

#50. Turkey is a European country, an Asian country, a Middle Eastern country, Balkan country, Caucasian country, neighbor to Africa, Black Sea country, Caspian Sea, all these.

Ahmet Davutoglu

#51. If there was no black man there would be no Rock'n'Roll. The beat, the rhythms of Africa are what created Rock'n'Roll and Jazz.

Ray Manzarek

#52. The country is like a great sponge - it finally absorbs you. Eventually you will get malaria or you will get dysentery and whatever you do, if you don't keep doing it, the jungle will grow over you. Black or white, you've got to fight it every minute of the day.

Katharine Hepburn

#53. It's very difficult not to come across as a white supremacist when there are so many black inferiorists around.

David Bullard

#54. A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.

Haile Gerima

#55. Why should not Africa give to the world its Black Rockefeller, Rothschild and Henry Ford? Now is the opportunity. Now is the chance for every Negro to make every effort toward a commercial, industrial standard that will make us comparable with the successful business men of other races.

Marcus Garvey

#56. We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

Saul Williams

#57. I have one thing in common with the emerging black nations of Africa: We both have voices, and we are discovering what we can do with them.

Miriam Makeba

#58. The virus is moving quite substantially into new locations. My attention is pretty much equally divided between Europe, the southern Balkans and Black Sea area, Africa and south Asia.

David Nabarro

#59. South Africa is labouring to find its revolutionary path; the colours of the Rainbow Nation have difficulty blending together; the wealthy elites (white, black or Indian) profit from de facto segregation.

Tariq Ramadan

#60. The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.

Pauline Hanson

#61. I spent seven months in Africa and came back saying there isn't anything you can say about black people that you couldn't say about, say, pink people except that they're black.

Larry Rivers

#62. Colonialism has a bad reputation in the modern context, but Colonial Africa was a far better place for both black and white before the colonists gave up.

Jeff Cooper

#63. We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.

Nelson Mandela

#64. S'tjwetla is a black man's striptease.

Toba Beta

#65. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#66. Human history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.

Malcolm X

#67. Though the white man is a kind of Satan, and though the black man is Satan for selling his own children into bondage and assassinating the image of his own mother, because he himself wants to be white'I can assure you that Africa has known no greater Satan than the twins, Arab and Islam.

Kola Boof

#68. Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

Nadifa Mohamed

#69. The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.

Malcolm X

#70. I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

Langston Hughes

#71. I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman ... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.

Trevor Noah

#72. Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.

Oliver Tambo

#73. If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!

Adam Sedgwick

#74. When black fury meets white denial, you have the combustible and fundamentally changed race relations we live in today.

Ferial Haffajee

#75. A charging black rhinoceros is nothing to mess with. When it is headed straight toward you, it is the ultimate exercise in sphincter control. In my case, it was a strange bit of weather that caused one to charge me.

Boyd Norton

#76. In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.

Nadifa Mohamed

#77. We have a vision of South Africa in which black and white shall live and work together as equals in conditions of peace and prosperity.

Oliver Tambo

#78. As their figures recede, it strikes Filsan as ironic that they had delayed fleeing so they could take as many of their possessions as possible, but now those very possessions prevent their flight.

Nadifa Mohamed

#79. No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa & America.

Thomas Jefferson

#80. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.

Barack Obama

#81. My story has more than a "great white hope" plot. I loved and respected Tom because he was a servant of God who happened to be white, just as I feel I am a servant of God who happens to be black and from Africa.

Francis Mandewah

#82. Moral writing is boring.

Johan Van Wyk

#83. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Karl Marx

#84. The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

Henry Louis Gates

#85. Black(people) hold onto their God just as the drunken man holds on to the street lamp post - for physical support only.

Tai Solarin